pensiveHe then gave me an overview of the company and the position he's looking to fill. It's an operations job, involving a fair amount of time keeping their infrastructure up and running. However, since the company is very small, other work is involved, such as setting up people's desktop computers. They have a number of challenges in that they want to scale up their service offerings significantly, but most of their processing happens on the server side, so they have to deal with lots of performance-related problems. In closing, he asked me which aspects of the job I would be most and least excited about. I said that I was most excited about dealing with the performance issues, but concerned about the internal support aspects of the job. (It isn't that I think such work is beneath me, but as I've written in the past, it hurts me professionally (especially on interviews) not to have spent a significant amount of time in a professional capacity as a computer scientist/software engineer. That is how I am judged. Also, internal support work is by no means guaranteed employment; it's just as susceptible to automation, offshoring, replacement by a cheaper worker, etc. as anything else in the computer industry.)
I told him that I'd like to pursue the position further. He said it would be about a week before I'd hear from him again. He has to talk to the other people in the ops group to get their opinions of me as a possible candidate. So, we'll see.
Update: SoundHound passed on me. They decided to go with a candidate who was a better match.
